Archive for May, 2016

Scripting custom REST APIs with Dreamfactory

So in my last article I talked about how to get Dreamfactory running within a Docker container with having immutability and horizontal scalability in mind and being able to use it with a Docker orchestrator like Mesos, Marathon, AWS ECS etc.

This time I’ll go into some details about extending it with custom logic / API endpoints as you certainly dont want to let API users access all of the auto-generated API endpoints in regard of security or they simply lack logic.
Dreamfactory has a good role-based ACL which works just fine for several service-types (e.g. MySQL DBs) where you can define server-side filters (e.g. by email from their session) on a record-level which allows users to only work on records belonging to them.
However the roles have their limits. But this is only one reason for adding custom services. You can script your own services aswell as “hook” into existing (auto-generated) services pre/post-process.

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Using Dreamfactory 2.x as REST API with Docker

For a new project I’m working on as Systems and Platform Architect, we were looking for an comparably easy and fast to implement, yet scalable and reliable way to build a RESTful API for various services we need to expose to mobile device users via iOS/Android Apps aswell as internal services.

Usually you have several MySQL/NoSQL Databases or similar which you need to query. We even have to deal with a 3rd party SOAP service. So wrapping all this into CRUD APIs and having ACLs for user roles etc would be quite a big story.

Fortunately there exists a great tool/framework which does alot of work for you nearly automagically. Its called Dreamfactory

Read on after the jump how Dreamfactory works and how we integrated it as BaaS into our docker-based PaaS.

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